RowingCAS—A Collision Avoidance System for Rowing

RowingCAS is a smartphone based Collision Avoidance System
(CAS) for rowing and the water sports.

RowingCAS warns about dangerous approaches with swimmers, other boats or
fixed obstacles
like buoys, poles, bridge piers etc.
Other boats and swimmers must be equipped with RowingCAS as well
to enable warnings.

It's dead-easy!

RowingCAS requires a mobile data connection which is nowadays
widely available on lakes or coastal areas.

While it was primarily designed for rowing,
RowingCAS is also perfectly suitable for
sailing, kayaking, small motor boats
and yachts.

Tracking

RowingCAS includes a
live tracking function. Tracking can be
enabled and disabled using the Settings menu.

How does it work?

Once per second, RowingCAS sends a position update to a tracking
server. The server determines whether a collision risk exists with
another RowingCAS device or a fixed obstacle. In this is case, an alarm tone
sounds and the target symbol on the display changes color in accordance
with the time to and distance at closest approach.

The algorithm is carefully designed to warn only if a collision risk
actually exists.

Besides computing the collision risk, the server also sends back the
position of the five closest targets within display range.

A note on fixed obstacles

Fixed obstacles are stored in a server-side database.
They are shown as green circles on the
tracking site (please
zoom in on your area!). Because RowingCAS is so new, the map
isn't complete yet. In order to complete it, we'd like to invite
you to help us by contributing your obstacles. Your local knowledge
is the best (and in fact, only) way to ensure good data quality.

Please contact us for write
access to the obstacle map. Don't worry, the process is fast
and efficient!

How much does it cost?

The passive beacon function of RowingCAS (e.g. for swimmers) is and will
remain free. We do however plan to introduce a moderate
fee for other functions like tracking, active collision warning
service (i.e., radar + alarm tones) etc.
in the future.

System requirements

RowingCAS supports Android and iPhone. It needs:

A mobile data plan (data amounts are very small)

GPS reception

Future directions

The principle of RowingCAS is applicable in other contexts
like personell tracking and machine avoidance in the Mining,
Earth Moving, Shipping etc. industries. If you're interested in using
consumer hardware for these applications, please don't hesitate
to be in touch.